


a hundred fearful places

by twelvemagpies



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! - All Media Types, Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: dialing the wrong phone number but like metaphysically, for YGO Secret Santa 2019, ryou does one (1) good deed and watches it backfire dramatically, somewhere in downtown domino seto kaiba's -supernatural shenanigans- senses are tingling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-03
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2021-02-18 16:36:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21780514
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twelvemagpies/pseuds/twelvemagpies
Summary: Ryou offers to summon Atem after the ceremonial duel—just a quick reach back across the Shadow Realm to make sure he’s alright, to get everyone some closure. And it even almost works.
Relationships: mentioned Kaiba Seto/Mazaki Anzu | Tea Gardner, past Atem/Mazaki Anzu | Tea Gardner/Kaiba Seto
Comments: 4
Kudos: 23





	a hundred fearful places

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LyricalMelody](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LyricalMelody/gifts).



> my gift for [meythecat](https://meythecat.tumblr.com/) as part of the [YGO Secret Santa](https://yugiohsecretsantaevent.tumblr.com/) event! 
> 
> title's from edna st. vincent millay’s “time does not bring relief; you all have lied”: _there are a hundred places where i fear to go—so with his memory they brim._

It's the taste of cinnamon, bright and sudden in the back of Ryou's throat.

It's also the way the mirror takes on a light of its own, a smoky haze from within the glass, and how Anzu's nails dig into Ryou's arm when all the lights in the room snap off. (He's never held with all that melodramatic shit of dozens of flickering candles on a dark and stormy night. Accuse him of lacking flair, but Ryou would much rather be able to see what he's doing with temperamental things like summoning the dead.) The wan light from inside the mirror is enough to illuminate Anzu next to him as Ryou flicks on the flashlight.

Anzu leans forward to peer at the mirror, hands absentmindedly patting where she’d gripped Ryou too tight. “Did it work?”

Ryou coughs, the burn of cinnamon curling on his tongue as he sucks a breath in between his teeth. “I think so.” He reaches for the bottle of water at his elbow. “Do you taste that?”

Anzu pauses, running her tongue along her teeth before she grimaces. She takes the bottle gratefully. “Is that it?”

“That’s it.” Even as he’d let Anzu into his apartment, Ryou had seen her glancing around—expecting skulls and candles dripping wax and perhaps a cauldron coughing up smoke. It’s partly his own fault, Ryou knows, since he hasn’t had anyone over in _—ever,_ now that he thinks about it. He makes a point of going _to_ people instead, hanging out with Yugi at the shop or in the flat he and Jou share or meeting Anzu for coffee. Honda’s made it the closest to Ryou’s home so far, dropping him off more than once on his bike after their get-togethers every couple weeks, Ryou waving from the doorway before spending the ride up with his forehead pressed to the cold metal of the elevator doors. 

It’s not that he doesn’t want them over, exactly. They’re friends now, though he’s sure they’d make the argument that they always have been. But they’re at least _better_ friends now, after everything, once the reality of Egypt and everything they’d left behind had settled into a dull ache. To his surprise Anzu had called first, inviting him out for a lunch that became a wander through town and a night in, watching cat compilation videos as Anzu regaled him with the trials and tribulations of dating Seto Kaiba. Of dating _just_ Seto Kaiba.

(She’d had to stop, a few times, midway through a story about her boyfriends at each other’s throats over something ridiculous. After the third time Anzu just shrugged, nonchalant even though her hands had started to shake. “Things are different, after Egypt,” she’d said, and Ryou hadn’t said anything at all.)

The cherry on top had been _Seto_ reaching out, of all people, first under the pretense of getting Ryou’s input on some tarot-based new monsters. And almost immediately afterwards, as if he’d gone through the motions of polite indifference and could abandon them entirely, for games of chess and meandering conversations about the slow descent into madness of the PhD students at the museum (Ryou) or the minutiae of business meetings with the assorted hordes of big businessmen (Seto, with occasional reenactments courtesy of Mokuba). Seto never mentions Egypt. The entire last semester of their high school experience seems as lost to him as the shifting sands of a place he pretends he’s never been; Seto Kaiba might as well have jumped from the end of December directly into his first university class in April.

Ryou had asked Seto why he even _needed_ to go to university (besides that Yugi had made it in and there wasn’t a bone in Seto’s body that wasn’t competitive), and the head of KaibaCorp had said, in a moment of terrifying honesty from the mouth of someone like Seto Kaiba, “Because I need something to do.”

At the time Ryou had shrugged and gone back to stirring his tea, clattering his spoon against the cup in a vain attempt to throw Seto off his groove in their cutthroat round of Diamond Game. But he gets it. Ryou knows how a city’s streets can become weapons, the landmines under each step on the crosswalk between their school and the café they’d spent afternoons in or how Yugi had confessed once, under his breath, that his home seemed so much quieter now. Ryou watches it happen, starting on a silent flight from Egypt to Japan and creeping into the pauses between breaths and the ends of every conversation. He’s lived it once already, how Amane had left a hole in her wake, how it healed over into a Space—a shelf of favourite books untouched, an empty seat at the table—where Amane (where _Atem)_ simply _isn’t_ anymore. Seto and Anzu do it now with Ryou watching like he’s keeping vigil at a wake, orbiting around the Space where Atem isn’t even as it grows larger and larger. It spreads into the corner of every room and drags at their ankles like a second shadow and Ryou, quite frankly, has had enough. There’s some amount of selfishness in his offer to do this, to do anything to get out from under this shroud Atem’s left in his wake, but the way Anzu _looked_ at him—

He surprises himself, the fierceness that bubbles up under his skin as he makes plans for Anzu to come by and checks the supplies he needs. Because really, Ryou likes things simple. He makes big, complicated dioramas and figurines painted down to the tiniest detail, but they all follow a straightforward plan.

So in the end, all it takes to reach beyond the veil and ring up Atem in the Field of Reeds is a mirror propped up on his futon and a familiar coaxed out of the smoke of a stick of incense with mochi-sticky fingers. “Find Atem,” Ryou murmurs, and away it goes.

And now they’re here, sitting in the dark and watching the surface of the mirror eddy and swirl. 

Anzu frowns. She reaches out to trace the glass but stops at the last second, thinking better of it. The room is still and dark, nothing but them and the murmur of traffic far below them. “How are we gonna know if it worked?”

“I think you’ve succeeded.”

They jump at the voice, Anzu’s hands flying to cover her mouth and the gasp it pulls from her. It’s _Atem,_ somewhere behind the whorls and eddies in the fogged glass. The surface of the mirror ripples like someone dragging their fingers through still water. “I cannot see you, the water is clouded."

“That's fine,” Ryou assures him, even though he has no idea what that might mean, "sometimes that happens.”

“I see. I'm not well-versed in this, I'm afraid.” Atem sounds—unsure? Hesitant? Not anything Ryou is used to hearing from him. But he’s nearly lightheaded with relief. It worked and the way Anzu dabs at the corner of her eyes with the cuffs of her hoodie makes it worth it. 

“It's fine,” Anzu echoes, voice soft and suspiciously choked. Ryou glances at her and hurriedly looks away. He squeezes her hand instead and relaxes when she squeezes back. "This is enough.”

Atem murmurs an agreement and Ryou is torn between wondering if he should leave them alone for a moment and wishing he could record this for Seto. But he knows from experience that the playback will be nothing but static and suspicious shuffling, and Anzu still looks teary-eyed and stunned, mouth open but unspeaking. Ryou picks up the slack in the awkward stretch of silence. “How—How are you doing?”

"Well!" Atem laughs, rich and amused. "I am well."

Ryou snorts and some of the tension bleeds from the room. It’s just them again, albeit a bit more long-distance than usual, crowding together to catch up like they’d used to with homework and duel decks spread all over the floor. He leans back on his hands and stretches his legs out. “Oh? Long day in paradise?”

That startles a laugh out of Anzu and she swats at Ryou’s leg. Atem scoffs. “Oh, yes! Nothing but figs and honey and a river of milk!”

“Is it really a field of reeds?” Anzu asks. She tucks her knees to her chest and wraps her arms loosely around her shins. “Everyone keeps calling it that.”

Atem pauses but the fiddling with the mirror’s surface carries on. It’s achingly familiar, Ryou thinks. Atem could rarely keep his hands still as Yugi’s shadow, always fidgeting with the puzzle or shuffling through his deck. “Of course it is,” he finally replies, “but the fields of reeds are much closer to the river.”

“Must be that river of milk,” Anzu teases, smiling so wide it must hurt when Atem laughs in response. 

They lapse into another silence, the sound of car horns and the ever-present hum of neon adverts slipping into the silence. Ryou watches the flicker of the billboard across the street scrawl across his ceiling as he struggles to think of something to say—if he’d been asked a year ago what he thought talking to the dead would be like, Ryou wouldn’t have said unbearably _awkward—_ but Atem speaks before he can think of anything. 

“I must admit,” Atem says, “you seem much different than any of the other spirits Mahad’s summoned before.”

_What?_

“Mahad?” Anzu asks. Her smile starts to crumble, lips pressed together and eyebrows furrowing. 

“Yes, my priest?” Atem chuckles and something cold claws its way down Ryou’s spine. “Prince or not, he’d have my hide if he knew I’ve been meddling, summoning demons with his scrying things.” He hums consideringly. “Though I’d only come in here for my ring—I didn’t think demons could summon themselves.” 

“Atem,” Ryou starts, with the sudden, dreadful certainty that something is terribly wrong, “What year is it, where you are?”

It’s a trick question, of course. Or at least it _should_ be, because what use do the gods and the dead have for something as silly and mortal as time? But Atem replies, “It’s my year of coronation.” He stops, the rippling in the mirror stopping too. “Tomorrow I become Pharaoh.”

A sharp crack makes Anzu and Ryou jump, the beam of the flashlight cutting a wide arc across their startled faces. Anzu presses a hand to her chest and Ryou can hear his own heartbeat pounding in his ears as they stare at the crack splintering across the glass. They exchange glances—Ryou doesn’t need to say it. Their time is running out.

“Ryou,” Anzu murmurs, voice low to keep Atem from hearing, “what _happened?”_

Ryou bites his lip, worrying it between his teeth as he thinks. All things considered, there wasn’t much room for something to go wrong— _find Atem,_ he’d said, and that’s what it did. The name was the trick, the bridge across the space between them and the doors Atem had walked through. But now that Ryou thinks about it, standing on one side of a bridge spanning the ages between him and a king long dead, whose name was it really? Three thousand years of silence and then a heartbeat of time as Yugi’s shadow, was he really even _Atem_ anymore? Or had the name sloughed off him like skin from a snake, too small to hold him? 

_Find Atem,_ he’d said, and his familiar found the one person in all of space and time who had any real claim to that name anymore.

“I think,” Ryou says slowly, “that we got the wrong Atem.”

“The wrong Atem? Ryou, there only _is_ one!”

“We’re talking to Atem,” Ryou insists, “but not _ours.”_ Anzu opens her mouth to reply and Ryou adds, “He has no idea who we are! He’s still alive, Anzu, I fucked up and he’s the _wrong Atem.”_

“Oh.” She shifts forward onto her knees, leaning towards the futon and the mirror and Atem beyond it. “So he—” Anzu swallows, starts again. “He doesn’t know what happens next, does he?” 

Ryou grips Anzu's wrist and pulls her away from the mirror, back out of earshot. "We can't say anything!" he hisses.

He expects her to fight him on it, expects a rousing (if muted) speech on the importance of friendship and of keeping people they love safe, but Anzu— 

Anzu takes a deep, deep breath, eyes slipping shut. When she opens them again, she nods. "Yeah. Yeah, of course." She smiles softly when she sees Ryou looking at her. “I get it, Ryou.”

“Have you left?” Atem asks. His voice sounds further away than before. The crack in the mirror spiderwebs farther across the glass, and Ryou bites his lip again. Anzu gasps, fingers digging into her knees. Their breath mists around their faces—Ryou hadn’t even noticed but now the room is _freezing._ They’re running out of time, they’re running out of time and he didn’t even do it right, can’t even make good on a simple promise— 

"If you had a friend," Ryou hears himself blurt through the building static in his ears, Anzu whipping around to look at him, "a friend—closer than a friend—who was in danger, what would you do?"

Atem scoffs, confusion replaced with indignation at a speed Ryou remembers well. “I would protect them,” he says, and the certainty in his tone makes Anzu smile again.

“You promise?” she asks.

“With my very life.”

It’s just like Atem, Ryou thinks, pulling off a dramatic exit without even trying. The crack reaches the other end of the mirror’s frame. The glass shatters with a bang, smoke hissing as it pours from the wreckage. Shards of glass glitter in the beam of the flashlight as they scatter all over the futon, the floor, all over Anzu and Ryou in stinging little pinpricks as a clap of thunder rolls just outside the window.

The hallway light in Ryou’s apartment comes on with a click.

Over the roar of his pulse Ryou hears the telltale sounds of someone taking off their shoes at the door, then the thump of a bag set down. Through it all a soft humming, some tune Ryou’s probably heard on the tinny radio playing in the corner of Kame Game.

“Ryou? Sorry to bother you at home, but you left your textbook at Kame! I found it when I was closing up and your place is on my way home and—”

Yugi stops as he steps into the main room, one hand still on the door jamb. He arches an eyebrow and Ryou can only imagine what they look like, sitting in the dark, crowding around a broken mirror. “Your, uh, your door was open,” he offers. 

“Right.” Ryou gets to his feet, winces as his knees click and muscles cramp from so long on the floor. He tries the light switch on the wall and blinks as the room floods with light. There’s glass _everywhere._ “Thanks.”

It’s a testament to the amount of weird shit Yugi’s seen in his day that he takes the scene before him in stride, idly wandering in the direction of Ryou’s kitchenette and passing over the dustpan and broom when Ryou reaches for them. “It’s good your power’s back,” he comments. “Half the block’s been out for like twenty minutes.”

Anzu cringes and Ryou occupies himself sweeping up the glass on the floor and bundling the broken frame into his blanket. “The power went out here too,” Anzu says, meeting Ryou’s eye with a sheepish grin when Yugi turns his back, “but I guess they started fixing it!”

“I hope—Ryou, do you mind if I turn on the kettle—I hope so.” Dressed for a summer evening, Yugi rubs his bare arms and rocks from foot to foot as he waits for the water to boil. “It’s _freezing_ in here, how are you two not cold?”

Ryou mumbles some noncommittal reply and brushes past Yugi in the small space to toss the dustpan and broom back in their corner. Across the room, Anzu is standing with her arms crossed over her chest, staring thoughtfully at the blanket in the corner. Nothing about this night went like it should have and the beginnings of bone-deep guilt starts to spread in Ryou’s gut like an oil slick. But Anzu must sense his imminent spiral into despair—she glances up and meets Ryou’s eyes over Yugi’s head again, mouths _thank you._

The adrenaline of Atem’s departure and Yugi’s arrival is starting to fade, and Ryou supposes it’s more closure than they’d had this morning. Anzu’s phone goes off on the table and she answers it as she steps out onto the balcony. “Seto! Hi—”

Anzu slides the door shut behind her, cutting off the sudden blast of warm, humid summer air. It curls through the room as the kettle goes off, and Ryou takes a deep breath as he reaches past Yugi for the mugs on the shelf above the stovetop. The smoke from the broken mirror is long gone but something lingers, and Ryou figures it out just as Yugi turns to him, tilting his chin at where Anzu leans against the railing and laughs with the phone pressed to her ear.

It’s the taste of cinnamon, bright and sudden in the back of Ryou’s throat.

**Author's Note:**

> lmao i made a point to double-check the japanese school trimester system and then completely disregarded canon ages by the end of the series, so at this point i'm well past cherry-picking canon i'm already making the damn pie. and fjsdklfa i didn't realize that diamond game is also the name of a lottery machine manufacturer and an app game, in this fic seto and ryou are playing chinese checkers bc it's called "diamond game" in japan
> 
> this is definitely not a pairing/ship i've ever written, but it was kind of cool to write it through ryou's perspective tbqh! as always, i'm [twelvemagpies](https://twelvemagpies.tumblr.com/) and i'm trying to get back into writing ygo stuff so come holler at me


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